Open Hand Kitchen

Address

1026 S. Jackson Street

Description

The Open Hand Kitchen serves free meals for lunch and dinner at 12 p.m. and 5 p.m. every day of the year to anyone who walks through its doors. Everyone deserves to eat a nutritious meal. We serve people with a variety of backgrounds, such as babies, toddlers, teenagers, single parents, Veterans, and seniors. These can be our existing clients and those in the neighboring Smoketown and Shelby Park areas.

Each meal is nutritious and typically consists of a meat, vegetable, starch, and salad to include the main food groups. Staff and volunteers serve meals in our cafeteria-style dining room. With about 60 monthly meals to prepare for, the Open Hand Kitchen has many volunteer teams totaling 400 people. These groups range from schools, businesses, our conferences, churches, neighborhood friends, nuns, and individuals.

Facility

The Open Hand Kitchen is a fully operating commercial kitchen run out of St. Paul Catholic Church on our campus. The old church sanctuary has a capacity allowing for more than 100 guests to sit comfortably on the main floor. There are two televisions that show the weekly menu, supportive services on and off campus, and the TARC bus routes. The stained-glass windows of scenes from the life of Christ, hardwood floors, and altar remained untouched.

Support 

At the Open Hand Kitchen, the kitchen staff prepares lunch and dinner for roughly 345 people each meal. They begin cooking at 9 a.m. for lunch at 12 p.m., and again at 2 p.m. so that dinner is ready at 5 p.m. When guests arrive to the Open Hand Kitchen for lunch or dinner, they go through the food line and retrieve their plate of food, silverware and napkins, fill up their drink of water, and sit down to eat. After they’re done, they clear their plate and bring it to the dishwashing area to be cleaned. The Open Hand Kitchen also serves breakfast to 70 single men at Ozanam Inn.

St. Paul Catholic Church, which was built in 1914, was converted into the Open Hand Kitchen in October 1983, when it was gifted to us. In 1982, the Archdiocese of Louisville donated the St. Paul Catholic Church, St. Paul School building, and the rectory—all of which are adjacent buildings—to us. The buildings were originally called the St. Vincent DePaul Center and would focus on providing food and shelter. This became the heart of our Shelby Park campus launch and future growth. Up to that point, we were primarily made up of groups of volunteers—called a conference—who were scattered throughout Louisville serving those in need. 
 

In the first month of operations, the Open Hand Kitchen had lines of more than 100 people waiting to be let in for lunch and dinner and provided 12,000 free meals. Roughly six months later, Ozanam Inn Men’s Emergency Shelter opened in the St. Paul School building next door to the Open Hand Kitchen, which provided meals for the homeless on our campus.  
 

Within the first decade, the Open Hand Kitchen became the largest agency feeding those in need in Kentucky, with more than 25,000 meals being served each month. Early on, 48 SVDP Conferences, which made up the Council of Louisville, were involved in providing enough volunteers for each meal.  
 

The dimly lit basement initially housed the kitchen, dining area, and offices for the first 14 years. After St. Paul Catholic Church closed its worship services in 1992, we decided to move our kitchen operations from there to the sanctuary. In September 1995, $700,000 worth of renovation work began on the church so that the Open Hand Kitchen could move to the main body of the church for all kitchen functions, such as food storage, food preparation, and serving of guests. This two-year project upgraded the cooking process to have a restaurant industry standard that could produce large amounts of food quickly and safely.  
 

The Open Hand Kitchen temporarily discontinued serving lunch from Aug. 2024 to April 2025 during major renovations at Ozanam Inn Men's Emergency Shelter.